


light at the beginning of the tunnel (but he tells me that i'm dreaming)

by highfunctioningsociopath (RUNNFROMTHEAK)



Series: wires [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Drug Abuse, Episode: The Abominable Bride, Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective, Hallucinations, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Sherlock Holmes, M/M, Mind Palace, POV Sherlock Holmes, Past Abuse, Past Mary Morstan/John Watson, Past Sherlock Holmes/Victor Trevor, Pining Sherlock Holmes, Possibly Unrequited Love, Post-Episode: The Abominable Bride, Post-Episode: s04e01 The Six Thatchers, Self-Worth Issues, Sherlock Holmes Has Feelings, Sherlock Holmes Is Not Okay, Sherlock Holmes Loves John Watson, Sherlock Holmes and Drug Use, Sherlock Holmes is a Bit Not Good, Sherlock's Mind Palace, Suicide Attempt, Survivor Guilt, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Victorian John Watson, no beta we die like mycroft's heart when his bby bro shot a man for a bi with a beard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:15:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29170191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RUNNFROMTHEAK/pseuds/highfunctioningsociopath
Summary: He may have ached for that London, those comforts and simplicities, especially once words never known and ever felt branded his memory palace, but he hadn’t meant to return.He falls into it between slips of moments, between calculated doses.Sherlock sees Watson’s smooth mustache and glimmering eyes after his first drag of sativa, his own skin coarse with facial hair he hasn’t cared to remove. The drug slips in his lungs like a chemical hug, engulfing him in warmth and otherness and he laughs. One more drag, and Watson’s there, fond and caring and play-irritated in that familiar must you insist on stomping all over London at half past one way. It’s a quick thing, a small grin real and whole, a dip of that absurd hat.Watson is gone in what could be seconds or minutes or hours or years, and with him that chemical hug evaporates too.Sherlock aches for things he’s never understood, nor wanted to want.***Sherlock needs John. Sativa offers him Watson instead.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: wires [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2131431
Comments: 8
Kudos: 27





	light at the beginning of the tunnel (but he tells me that i'm dreaming)

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for the lovely comments on the previous ones! I hope you guys like this one just as much! Not a whole lot of plot, I felt like writing a little something expanding upon the time between i can hear it in your voice and mr. know-it-all, so the series has been restructured a bit. Hope you like <3

He hadn’t intended to return. Victorian London holds its own sort of allure, delicious danger at every corner, nothing but pure _intellect_ unaided by modern machinations to solve puzzles of every sort—

( _a John Watson that still looks at you like you hung the sun and the stars just for him, like you’re the center he orbits, a gravity he doesn’t care to escape. A place where deductions still evoke tenderness, approval. Where John Watson still wants to hear your voice and cares for you, even with Mary._ )

—but it had been dangerous. It had been utterly reckless, a calculated OD with no less than five compounds of varying effects, each boosting the others into a delightful failing of his heart that hadn’t lasted because his transport’s tenacity outweighed his mind’s desires. The fanciful realm where his life hadn’t gone to complete and utter shite had never been a conscious plan. Sherlock hadn’t intended for his brain to grasp for a chain, a link to reality in the form of delusions and hallucinations and _awful_ attempts at honesty. He hadn’t planned for a _did you miss me?_ Despite all his claims to the contrary at the time.

( _You had to solve it, to solve Moriarty’s death. It’s a lie. You and Mary and Mycroft all know it’s a lie, but John wants to believe you. He wants to think it’s not a lie, that you didn’t just attempt the very thing that had broken your relationship with him in the first place – false or not. He wants to think it, and you force everyone to comply with it._ )

Sherlock’s heart had raced, thundering so loud he’d been certain John would hear it from the ground, that the plane’s turbulence was simply the rhythm of his soon-to-expire pulse stubbornly clinging to existence. Even the weight of the list, the feel of his brother’s sorrow-filled gaze – (“ _Your loss would break my heart_ ”) – hadn’t lessened his desire for this. To have it end.

_Don’t get involved._

He’d entangled himself so completely, so wholly, that it had become a makeshift noose. A source of misery, an offset to the – _fantastic, brilliant, wonderful, genius_ – neutrality of analytics and deductions and distance.

_Human error._

Sherlock had let himself feel. Let himself gain…attachments. He'd allowed for the continuation of a friendship with someone he’d fallen in love with, resigned himself to befriending the ex-assassin that had shot him in the heart to keep John, gave up his – _mind, body, heart, soul, freedom, life_ – to allow for John’s happiness. To allow for his family of three, a family where Sherlock could and would never belong—

(All lives end _._ All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage.)

—he’d never meant to invent a more palatable reality in a drug-induced stupor born from suicidal intent. Sherlock had never expected reciprocation, had locked any attempts his subconscious made to fantasize John deep enough that even he has trouble recalling where they are. Never dreamed of it, outside the few slipups.

Sherlock Holmes loves John Watson. Fact.

John Watson does not love Sherlock Holmes. Also fact.

But he’d been dying, his mind palace a scrambling seizure of discontinuous thoughts, and ill-advised sentiments had a way of sipping past his defenses and crawling right up through his rib cage to his unfortunately beating heart.

Sentiment won out, his heavy eyes flickering over the details of their first meeting reverently, delicately, and so he’d found Victorian London better than he’d left his London.

Of course, he’d only gone the once. He’d slugged through both realities and neither of them, a blog post and a case file and a needle already taken and a needle ready to take. A John Watson waiting for him, inclusive and caring and so ineffably _warm_ like he had been before, and the lukewarm variety he’d become after two years and a happy wife. One, a sun. The other, a mere planet, with him the rotating moon foolish enough to crave its gravity.

He may have ached for that London, those comforts and simplicities, especially once words never known and ever felt branded his memory palace, but he hadn’t meant to return.

He falls into it between slips of moments, between calculated doses.

Sherlock sees Watson’s smooth mustache and glimmering eyes after his first drag of sativa, his own skin coarse with facial hair he hasn’t cared to remove. The drug slips in his lungs like a chemical hug, engulfing him in warmth and _otherness_ and he laughs. One more drag, and Watson’s there, fond and caring and play-irritated in that familiar _must you insist on stomping all over London at half past one_ way. It’s a quick thing, a small grin real and whole, a dip of that absurd hat.

Watson is gone in what could be seconds or minutes or hours or years, and with him that chemical hug evaporates too.

Sherlock aches for things he’s never understood, nor wanted to want.

Watson talks at him when he treats sativa as a doorway – _no different from your cold treatment of Janine, right? Sociopath, right?_ – and struts through them all bit by bit. In his younger years, when chemistry had called and sentiment had evaded him, when the high of _fucking_ lost it’s moderate appeals and the high of _learning_ disintegrated along with Victor Trevor’s life, he hadn’t dabbled.

It had been a carefully calculated business transaction. 3% at first, needle furiously cleaned with the obsessiveness of his brother. 5% a month later, new dealer once Mycroft had the old one removed with the beauty of blackmail. He took it – smoked it, injected it, snorted it, _whatever_ – and he took it when he needed numbness or he needed distractions or when he needed needed _needed_ for things not there and things _never_ there and things he’s always known he could never have—

( _They’d called you a freak for years at university. A variety of admittedly creative adjectives, and you’d encouraged it if only for the exercise of the placid brains and the expansion of their limited vocabularies. They’d called you freak, but it’s Victor that calls you machine. It’s Victor that calls you heartless, cold, emotionless._ Sociopath _, he’d hissed, furious and hurt and so many things you’d never been able to solve for all your prowess._ Can you love anything? How can anyone ever love you, when it leads to this? To ruin? _You’d never known if you’d loved him or if you’d lusted for him or if you’d cared for him. It had been all and nothing, and when it switched to nothing you’d ached like no other. Cocaine answers the emptiness, and it works better than strong legs and a willing body ever had._ )

—and he’d accepted it. He didn’t have _friends_ , despite Lestrade’s attempts. Despite Molly’s desires. Despite Mike’s pleasantness. He didn’t have friends, until he did.

 _Friends protect you,_ oh what a laugh. What an absolute _joke_. Friends leave you. Leave you weak and stupid, leave your body flooded with pointless hormones and neurotransmitters drowning out any lick of intelligence once possessed. Friends have never protected him, he’d protected himself before. No pressure points. No weakness. Him, the Work, and a willingness to die for nothing more than the thrill of answers and intellectual stimulation.

People move on, get married, have families, and there’s never been room for him in such constructions of normality. Murder and madness and mystery and dark corners with illicit drugs, that’s him. That’s _always_ been him, will _always_ be him.

Sentiment, a chemical defect, a tumor in reason and logic and intellect metastasizing to infect every ounce of independence and sanity and protection once maintained. Opening hearts, after all, is a one way deal.

It’s open, and it stays that way, and nothing and no one allows for it to shut.

But, not the point. Not the debate. Not the right moment. Because university and drugs had gone hand in bloody hand ‘round and ‘round the bend in a way he’d intended. Hits on his schedule, rarely increasing, never on the same day or hour. Never the same dealer, after Mycroft found the first three.

He checked it out on his own, made sure it was clean, and shot up. He didn’t mix or change or use more than he needed. User, not addict – _I’m not an addict, I’m a user. I alleviate boredom and occasionally heighten my thought processes_ – and it had mattered so much that John had known that. Known it wasn’t a weakness, wasn’t a pressure point, wasn’t something fallible, wasn’t another flaw in the horrible machinery of his transport, another betrayal of the biological kind.

Then, of course, the lists came. The ODs, first through third.

He mixed a bit, but never outside the opiate tree. Highly addictive, highly effective. User, so the former is irrelevant and the latter had been _everything_ before the Work. Before Lestrade’s stubbornness rivaled his brother’s and he’d _needed_ a raft in the flood of boredom. Needed something beyond the racing monotony of his regularity. Of his mind and deductions he couldn’t stop and couldn’t ignore.

He hadn’t mixed, but he’d been heartbroken and alone on the most important worst day of his life knowing he’d been at the end of an era of _him_ and on the precipice of an era of everything _but_ him so he hadn’t cared. He had his needles, obsessively cleaned, but he mixed. He had fentanyl and cocaine. A dash of heroine, pinch of LSD. Even methadone, when he’d felt like it.

For the first few days, at least.

He’d stuck to coke afterwards, when the case came and Charles Magnussen took an interest, too wired by that to bother with new highs. Too focused, needing to constrict weaknesses to manageable ones, things he’s known like a lover and an enemy for almost his entire life.

Cocktails came with his death sentence, his brother blinded by that tumor of sentiment. John, his doctorbloggerflatmatebestfriendloveofhislife, blinded by it too. Unwilling and unable to see the signs, to feel the tremors, to smell it on Sherlock’s breath and blood.

Sherlock made his future corpse into a love declaration, entombing his affections in his Belstaff and parting lie.

( _another love declaration unheard, silent and burned into your skin like hydrochloric acid from your earliest experiments. Like a bullet through your chest. Like a wedding gift-wrapped in so-detested sentiment, followed by a speech dripping with it despite the uncomfortable slap in the face in the form of one James Sholto. Like lying for the very woman who'd murdered you. Like accepting scrapes and placating John when guilt struck over the lack of scraps. Like a bullet through Charles Magnussen’s temple, in defence of her rather than retribution of you_ — you’ll get used to it…I’ve never had a detective before — _like every hourminutesecond you force yourself from John’s side. You can’t say the words, can’t choke them out at the last possible second, because it’s two years too late for any possibilities, for those truths to leave your lips in any true way. You can’t say the words, so you leave your body as proof of them. Every great cause has martyrs, and every war its suicide missions, and loving John Watson is the greatest cause you’ve ever been forced into. A suicide mission from the start, and you’re the imbecile grateful for it._ )

Better John think him to have fallen in battle, in pursuit of the _Work_ than to think it his fault Sherlock shot up however many grams of whatever. Better he think it a fault of Sherlock’s transport than his heart. _Better_. He’s long ceased thinking of who it better for – him or John – because his no longer matters. Sickness, health, dull and boring and predictable and _dreadful_ and a thousand other things he doesn’t care for. The Work had mattered until John Watson had, and now _only_ John Watson matters.

Sherlock can’t take back the first time he snorted cocaine anymore than he can take back the first time love’s toxic tendrils leeched the life out of him. Some things leave their mark on the human body, a mark that revives with each replaced cell, each new dendrite grasping at other things. Love is a chemical defect, love is a drug, love is—

(I’ve always assumed that love is a dangerous disadvantage, _you say to Irene, low and cold as ice. She’s brittle before you, diamonds made into ash, a reverse of her normality. She’s beautiful, of course, enrapturing, but her tears are a disappointing truth of her weakness. Of her sentiment._ Thank you for the final proof.

 _You have your final proof. Your warnings and signs and flags blood red and covered in Semtex vests. You have it all and you’re still stupid enough to continue. To come back. To die, die, die time and time again. Your heart in his hand beating pointlessly. Your life his to take and break and make and he does all three._ )

After… _after_ the tarmacfaileddeathdidyoumissme he doesn’t seek out Watson, the one who’d said _do you mind_ about eloping and throwing Moriarty off a cliff, the one who’d inquired about his impulses and been frustrated by Sherlock’s dismissals. The figment of his mind palace, a John Watson that might love him back.

_You look sad when you think he can’t see you._

As ever, he ignores. Suppresses. Denies.

Sherlock doesn’t seek out sativa until Mary is dead and gone and it’s all his fault. Then, he sees Watson in the place John once was, the place he might never be again, and he aches and yearns and accepts.

Watson remains mute and smiling when he takes it again.

Watson frowns when he looks at the heroin, so he doesn’t take it yet.

Watson murmurs memories when he takes ecstasy on a case, in a club, with a man he doesn’t know the name of or care enough to learn.

Watson recalls past beratements the morning after, soft ones that don’t hurt, don’t scar, don’t ache. Ones that don’t brand his memory palace.

Watson’s eyes shine with tears when Sherlock does turn to cocaine, when he takes more than a careful 8% dose and has Wiggins move in to give him more. He talks rarely, imagined pleas he doubts John would ever voice or care to utter. He mostly looks sad. So sad, like he’s lost something vital.

He is Sherlock, so it only makes sense he’d look like that. It still hurts, like living in a John-Watson-free world hurts.

He seeks Watson until Sherlock becomes anyone instead of someone. Anyone by Molly’s mouth. Anyone by Culver’s hands. Anyone by not-Faith’s gun.

 _Anyone but you_.

When John Watson’s fists brand his transport with bruises rather than words, when he sits and sulks between minders trembling from withdrawals, he does not seek Watson again.

He knows John Watson’s heart now. It is closed entirely to him. Hope only makes reality hurt more; he quits both drugs cold turkey.

**Author's Note:**

> thoughts?


End file.
